Designers wanted: Join a Think-and-Make-Tank for Soul of Africa

Wednesday 22 April 2009 10-5.30pm
Saïd Business School, Oxford

We need up to 10 designers who want to use their design practices and skills to help social enterprise Soul of Africa tackle some of the challenge facing it, during a one-day workshop in Oxford in collaboration with MBA students.

The workshop is a participative, creative "think-and-make-tank" that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. MBA students from Saïd Business School will be joined by designers from different disciplines to help social enterprise Soul of Africa engage with key challenges.

Soul Of Africa is a charitable initiative and a self-sustainable project created to facilitate employment and funding aimed at helping orphans affected by AIDS through the sale of hand-stitched shoes. Unemployed and unskilled women in South Africa are trained to hand-stitch shoes, giving them the self-empowering ability to feed their families and provide them with essential health care.

Download more details here.

What we are looking for

Designers (recent graduates, current MA or BA design students, and design professionals) are invited to take part. Ideally, we’d like a mixture of people from these backgrounds:
- visual communication
- product/industrial design
- service design
- interface design
- fashion
- design management

How to get involved

To apply, send an email to Lucy Kimbell (lucy dot kimbell at sbs dot ox dot ac dot uk), to arrive on or by Friday 20 March 2009.

The email must include
- your name and contact details and any institutional affiliation
- your design discipline (eg product, visual communication)
- up to 150 words on why you want to participate.

Successful participants will be contacted by Friday 3 April at the latest. Reasonable travel expenses to Oxford (standard class return, UK only) will be reimbursed to those who attend the workshop, on the production of a receipt.

Apprenticeships: an economic history

Contemporary art and design practices - even if now taught in art and design departments in modern universities - bear some relation to the institutions of apprenticeships that developed over hundreds of years in several European countries. A seminar at Said last week raised some interesting questions about what we think we know, and what we actually know, about such apprenticeships. Tim Leunig of LSE, an economic historian, gave a wonderful seminar for the Centre for Corporate Reputation drawing on his work into apprentices in London in the pre-modern period. Given access to a huge set of data (produced a man whose job allowed him time to input vast amounts of data from historical records) about 161,000 London apprentices between 1420-1930, Leunig and colleagues found out some interesting things which challenged their - and my - assumptions about how people were trained in pre-industrial societies in England.

Looking specifically at records from 1600-1750 from 760 London companies (eg vintners, grocers) whose members were masters offering seven-year apprenticeships, Leunig and colleagues found, to their surprise, that
- kinship relations and local connections were not important in how young men chose their masters in London;
- nor were their fathers' trades important in the decisions they made about what to become apprentices in; and
- nor did the distance of their village or town from London have that much of an impact either.
There remain questions about how these young men did make decisions about who to pick to be their masters and what information they had available. But this research suggests that these young men made choices that were not encumbered by things we associate with pre-modern societies - such as kinship and location. Like "modern" apprentices, they made other kinds of choices.

Being of an ethnographic orientation myself, I must confess I have never really "got" quantitative research before. But now I do! The way these scholars framed questions around the data set, crunched numbers to produce something meaningful, and then told a clear story about it was an inspiring piece of scholarship.

Economies of contribution: a developing research agenda

At the invitation of Scott Lash and Götz Bachmann (cultural studies, Goldsmiths), philosopher Bernard Stiegler (Centre Pompidou) and Robert Zimmer (computer science, Goldsmiths), a diverse group gathered at Goldsmiths for a day or two to consider the idea of economies of contribution. The workshop included perspectives from media, art, design, software and other fields of theory and practice. In their introduction, the organizers outlined the emergence of a shift from consumer capitalism to an economy of contribution raising questions such as
- Are movements such as Open Source and Wikipedia just detached phenomena, or are they the pioneers of a new economy?
- How do specific localities and regions shape different economies of contribution?
- What are the new power relations and new forms of exploitation?
- How can we use and shape this economy of contribution?
Recent work on open source, crowdsourcing and user-generated content of course was relevant. What was distinctive here was to bring together those with a focus on cultural production, understood as art, design, film, software and broadcast, whether done by professionals or amateurs (if those terms fit).

During the workshop, presentations of research and practice included work by media artist Graham Harwood (MediaShed), Bronac Ferran (who organized the CODE conference in Cambridge in 2001 which had laid out many of the issues); artist Neil Cummings, several of whose projects have questioned the role of cultural collections (see Capital, 2001, at Tate); and Matt Fuller whose work emphasizes the importance of the commons. From Tate, there were presentations by Jennifer Mundy (research), Anna Cutler (learning) and James Davies (online) describing how they are designing new forms of consumption/engagement/contribution to their collection. From Centre Pompidou, there was an overview of some of the technologies of annotation they are developing such as Lignes de Temps. Unfortunately I had to miss the second day and presentations by design/art/media practitioner David Garcia, media theorists from Goldsmiths and others.

My contribution (here, about 7 pages, PDF) was to suggest resources from management and organization literatures that might have something to offer this emerging area, such as practice theory and the turn to design. At a time when the debt-laden consumerist economy seems to be in a tailspin, it is time to pay attention to ways of practice and organizing, and invent new cultural forms that invite a range of modes of participation, engagement and contribution. Media artists - specifically those inventing cultural forms that create novel arrangements of people, software and objects enabling new sets of relations; and service designers - who foreground the involvement of stakeholders in co-designing arrangements of objects and people over time and space - have, I believe, something important and distinctive to offer in the face of these challenges.

Image: screengrab from my project Making a Difference at the University of Plymouth (2004)

MBA Design Leadership elective - Think and Make Tank

This year's MBA elective in Design Leadership at Oxford from April-June will include a one day workshop in which the MBA class will collaborate with design students to help social enterprise Soul of Africa address some of the challenges they currently face. The exact details are being worked out, but I'm putting up this post now while the MBAs are considering signing up for the elective.

A think-and-make-tank is a participative, creative workshop that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. A one-day event such as this will crystallize ideas that can be taken forward by the organization, complementing its other activities.

The people involved on the day will be:
- approx 20-25 MBA students from Saïd Business School, taking the Design Leadership elective
- approx 8-10 MA design students from different disciplines such as product design, fashion and design management
- people from the Soul of Africa organization, including co-founder Lance Clark
- Saïd Business School faculty

To make best use of the day, Lance has identified three challenges facing the organization which the workshop will be designed to tackle, which are: marketing and communications; service operations/organization design; and product management. The combination of creative and bright students from management and from design will, we hope, serve to generate tangible, useable ideas for the organization, as well as offering an engaging learning experience.

We are seeking a small amount of funding to support this workshop, so please get in touch with me if you can help.

Things I've recently been ....

In the last few weeks, here are some of the things I've been consuming (or co-producing, depending on your theoretical orientation)

Reading
This Book Will Save Your Life, AM Holmes
A Late Dinner: Discovering the Food of Spain, Paul Richardson
Maisie's Bus, Lucy Cousins
A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), by: Bruno Latour, keynote at Design History conference, Cornwall, 2008
ZEITHAML, V. and BITNER, M.J., 2003. Services marketing: Integrating customer focus across the Firm, 3rd ed., New York, NY: McGraw-Hill
The Two Cultures, CP Snow
BIJKER, W. 2004. Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs: Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
ALEXANDER, C. 1962. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Looking at
Abigail Reynolds, The Universal Now, 17 Gallery, London
Turner Prize Show, Tate Britain
Cold War Modern, V&A

Watching
House
Lost
BBC CBeebies: In the Night Garden

Listening to
Montserrat Figueras Ninna Nanna

Eating and drinking
Smoked mackerel
Porridge
A bottle of Luigi Bosca Malbec from Argentina (thank you Tomas)

Introducing the critique to an MBA class

When Dick Boland visited us last term, one of the things he talked about was a paper by his Managing as Designing collaborator Fred Collopy (whose Fast Company blog is worth reading). As I recall, the idea was to apply an aspect of design practice - the crit (or critique) - to artefacts such as financial instruments. Inspired by their use of the crit, I decided to make explicit this way of approaching idea generation and development within our MBA Entrepreneurship Project this term.

I first experienced crits as part of my MA in what would now be called digital arts at Middlesex University's art school, a strange and wonderful course where they taught artists and designers to program in C so we could write our own software. Then later I taught in art and design colleges, where the crit is a standard part of the teaching and learning environment, mostly at the RCA in London on the MA Interaction Design which is also rooted in that art school tradition.

I can't cite any papers on this yet. What I know about crits is all tacit knowledge and reflection in practice - but the main features were as follows:
- the student presents to a group (faculty, possibly other students) their work to date
- they actually have to show artefacts (a model, a sketch, a set of photos from research, ideally several things)
- they have to explain what the artefact is, how they got to it, and why they did what they did so far (their reasoning)
- and what they plan to do next and why.
And then the people present, both teachers and other students, ask lots of incredibly difficult questions ranging from the nature of the enquiry, the method, the tools, but also the reasons. And also may suggest very concrete ideas too like what other materials or tools to try or other people's work to look at.

Viewed through the lens of practice theory, this is activity in which learning is embodied and situated, in which artefacts play key roles, in which habits and routines develop, in which there is thinking, and doing, and saying. It is therefore not something that can easily be ported to another context, such as the one I am now in, a business school.

But I thought I'd try. Having already introduced the idea to students taking my MBA elective in Design Leadership (in which we do a crit of the Said Business School), I decided to bring in a crit to this year's Entrepreneurship Project. Still at an early stage of their project development, the MBA teams presented along the lines described above, and received a lot of feedback from the people present - members of faculty and my guest designer/researcher Bas Raijmakers of STBY. Doing this prototyped a way of teaching that seemed to work but was novel in our school, where lectures and supervision are the dominant modes of learning and teaching. Oxford (and Cambridge) pride themselves on their tutorial system which has turned out great thinkers and doers, for many many years. Art and design schools have also turned out great thinkers and doers using the crit. The artefacts produced in each case vary (essays v anything at all that an art or design student might create) but the underlying method has some simliarities. But the crit offers something special in a context in which uncertainty about the problem space is high. For students generating ideas for a new business in the EP, it is not even clear what the problem or opportunity is, and it is here that art and design approaches are of value.

Photo by Alice Wang from workshop/crit during project involving MA and MBA students, Said Business Schooll 2007

Public innovation and digital media: what should public subsidy pay for?

This is a very big question, addressed by many of the great and the good, but I have an answer which comes at the end. The question underpinned a session on Public Innovation at the Oxford Media Convention 2009, held at Said Business School yesterday. Four speakers, two from the big bucks public broadcasters, one from a government taskforce, and one from a consultancy background and network of media activists, shared their visions for what was involved in public innovation in broadcast and digital media. This being the UK, with its long history of taxpayer-funded broadcasting and internet content, it was not a surprise that social and political agendas were taken for granted (although what currently mattered and to who, was not). Most likely other bloggers and twitters will give a better summary than me of the event, but I wish to draw out two tensions. And then answer the big question. At no direct cost to the public purse.

Richard Halton, (not sure of his current job title but something like) director of new media at the BBC, pointed to how the BBC, across much of what TV and radio people call its "output", now has such a raft of online services that there is "no difference between digital and non-digital". Current activities include Canvas, an effort to create common standards for convergence between online media and TV. And of course the BBC i-Player is a brilliant way for people around the world (those online, anyway) to access recent BBC radio and TV programmes. But in his talk, Halton several times referred to "content".

What is this "content"? And does his use of this term suggest the web-friendly BBC still has not understood the changes happening in peoples' homes, schools, offices, devices, heads, and lives? I love the BBC. I used to work as a business journalist on the BBC World Service in the early 1990s, and in 1997, when other institutions were still unsure what to do with the web, the BBC commissioned my company Soda to make online learning environments for children. But if the BBC still has the mindset that its job is to squirt content through media platforms at people (who may get to send in some of their "content" too) then it may not survive the next decades.

In contrast Jon Gisby, director of new media and technology at Channel 4, did not talk content. Instead he talked about the take-up of broadband in the UK in 2008 and "what people do with broadband" (notice the verb, do). While I am old enough to remember enjoying the launch of Channel 4 Television, I was convinced by his presentation of a vision of public innovation across media platforms that is not about pushing content. His discussion touched on the digital divide, media literacy, education, health and accountability - all terms connected with what institutions think taxpayers want from digital media. His vision questioned on a deep level where organizations that have a history of public service broadcasting should go next. Government spend online is also relevant, he argued, saying "every government department is realising it's a media business". Examples of things that Channel 4 is involved in include 4IP, a £50m fund run by Tom Loosemore to drive public digital media.

So here are two positions: there is stuff called content and there are platforms and technologies, or, there are sets of relations and things that people do which involve practices and infrastructure. Whichever view ends up dominating the public discussions about innovation in public media, there remains the question of what all that money should be spent on. Here is my answer. I think it could work for either position.

Public subsidy should not be spent just on more content, or more technology, but on processes that involve multi-disciplinary teams who take seriously insights learned from ethnography/participant observation, visual methods, and prototyping and involve many others in co-designing the future of public media. These teams should contain social scientists (who know something about people and their practices), designers (who know something about working through uncertainty and ambiguity using visual methods and prototypes), engineers (who can build things) and MBA-types (who are good at turning ideas into marketable models with numbers attached), and then the people who we might have called audiences but now are stakeholders. The brief to these teams is to imagine, invent, discover, create - or in a word - design the future for public media services driven by people's practices. Contemporary design practice and theory acknowledges the necessary incompleteness in design processes. Investing in that a design process attentive to the practices of people would be a start.

Designing new enterprises

This academic year, I'm teaching on the MBA Entrepreneurship Project, a term-long process during which the students generate, explore and develop ideas for new enterprises which they pitch to VCs at the end of term. My contribution is to help with the early stage of idea generation - which the problem space is not defined, let alone solutions in the form of identifiable products, services, strategies, or organizational forms. At this early phase of the development of a venture, design methods can play an important role in identifying practices which might offer business opportunities. Visual methods - such as this collage shown here- create ways for teams, often from diverse national and professional backgrounds, to work together. It might have been an idea to test whether those teams making use of the workshops I'm offering come up with "better" projects. Better for who?, of course. But what I'm seeing each week is that projects are moving from the realm of high level strategies, markets, and organizations to identifiable customers with practices around which services and products can be organized.

Blog party

Building Space with Words is a project by social scientist Anne-Laure Fayard (assistant professor of Management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, NYU-Poly) and artist Aileen Wilson, associate professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute. Along with several others, I have been invited to join their blog conversation where they/we discuss matters such as disciplines, practices, materiality, art v science, social science v science and so on. Indeed the subjects being discussed, and the range of backgrounds of the contributors are such that I was worried that I couldn't keep up with all the posts and all the threads. But then I realised it is rather like being at a party of people, some of whom know each other, or know of each other, or faintly recognise each other, with two hosts who keep offering drinks or things to eat, and introduce you to each other. But where are the gatecrashers?

"Designs of the year" that ignore over 50% of the economy

This is a posting about categorisation. It concerns the seven categories created for the Designs of the Year award which are: Architecture, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Interactive, Product and Transport. There is no category for services, which constitute a significant part of developed and developing economies. "Services" is of course a problematic term, an artefact of economic categorization that is perhaps too big to be useful. And it can be tricky to distinguish between where a product ends and service begins when you look at something like a car or a plane, where the servicing of the object and financing of the purchase may turn out to be more significant economically or in the mind of the consumer. As some management academics have suggested, the services category is everything services are not and that doesn't get us far.

But despite the problems with the "services" category, I could not help wishing there was one when I looked at the designs proposed for awards. It's great to see the Design Museum shifting its awards from individuals to projects, bringing to public attention many interesting projects in diverse fields of activity. The list of nominees is now public. But the choice of categories, I would argue, matters because it shapes the conversation about how and where design matters. As Bowker and Star (1999) showed in "Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences", classification has important consequences for individuals and for society.

In Designs of the Year, service design consultancy Engine's work with Kent County Council on the Social Innovation Lab comes under graphic design, for example. Within the transport category, there are excellent, possibly world changing projects which include services wrapped around objects such as the San Francisco charge spot for electric cars. One of the entries (which I found in the booklet I picked up at the museum, but not on the website) - Streetcar - which was designed by consultancy live|work, does not mention them as its designers.

My objection to these categories is that they serve to privilege and continue the object-centred way of thinking about design. Yes, you could say it's still the way of thinking of design that dominates design education. But Richard Buchanan's ideas of design thinking (1992), Victor Margolin's product milieu, Elizabeth Shove et al's Practice-Oriented Product Design and Guy Julier's Design Culture all point to different ways to think about design.

Image from Designs of the Year website project by Engine (used without permission)

Designing for Services: What do service designers do?

A film I made about service design practice is now available online as a resource for teaching and research. The film was created as part of a multidisciplinary study entitled Designing for Services in Science and Technology-based Enterprises, led by me and Victor Seidel at Saïd Business School, and involving many of our colleagues as well as designers, science entrepreneurs and other academics from design and organization studies. A publication with contributions from many of these people and discussion of the project as a whole is available.

The film adopts a practice theory perspective to explore what is distinctive about the ways professional service designers go about designing or redesigning services. It follows in detail an encounter between London-based service innovation and design consultancy live|work, and g-Nostics, a company offering personalised medicine, which originates in science research from Oxford University.

The film observes the designers as they go through some of the steps their design process, and finds that service designers do three things that distinguish their work from that of others. Firstly, the designers looked at the human experience as a whole and in detail. Secondly, they made the service tangible and visible. Finally, they created service concepts.

This research was funded by the Designing for the 21st Century initiative funded jointly by the AHRC and EPSRC.

Steve Woolgar: Mundane Governance

Designers wary of social theories - imagining that intuition, or something like it, will produce good design - would benefit from being attentive to the work of sociologist Steve Woolgar. In his recent lecture on the occasion of winning the J. D. Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), Steve produced a thoughtful demonstration of how it's hard to talk about "the social" without talking about objects and how they are involved in constituting it. Many designers, of course, have the opposite problem - they find it hard to talk about anything but objects and aren't interested in what "the social" might be.

Outside of social science, Steve is perhaps less well known than his close collaborator Bruno Latour, but he is an important figure. Their Laboratory Life (1979), is one of the most influential books in social studies of science published in the past 30 years. Steve enjoys telling people that his job title when hired at Saïd was professor of marketing. More recently - having along the way run whole events on the perplexing question of what Science and Technology Studies (STS) is doing in a business school - he has worked with Dan Neyland (now at Lancaster) on studying what they call mundane governance: looking in ethnographic detail at the now day-to-day, possibly boring objects that are involved in governance and accountability. Their examples include things like speed cameras, recycling boxes, and bottles of water. The latter, for example, are turned into weapons of terror once you pass from one zone into another in an airport. Key questions for Woolgar are who, which and what, is accountable to what, which and whom? Once governance is not just about the governance of people, but also about the governance of things, then the categories (and practices) that constitute mundane, ordinary life, should be considered.

Managing as Designing: Richard J Boland

One of the main contributors to contemporary debates about the role of design within management and academia, Richard J Boland of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, gave a special lecture at Saïd Business School last week. Boland's workshop (2002), and later edited book "Managing as Designing" (2004), is the result of an ongoing dialogue with his colleague Fred Collopy, inspired by their experience of working with architect Frank Gehry as he and his team designed their new building (shown above).

The Managing as Designing project brought together many of the most interesting thinkers in contemporary management and design theory as well as people from design and the arts. That thinking has now lead them to rethink and redesign their MBA, with the involvement of Richard Buchanan, formerly head of the design school at Carnegie Mellon University. Insights from their work are described in Fred Collopy's blog on Fast Company.

In his talk, Boland introduced the fundamental ideas behind the "design attitude" which he and Collopy argue should be central to management practice. "In business school we teach the history of the recent past," he said. "Design gets us out of that and into the creation of something new." Drawing on the ideas of Herbert Simon and philosopher John Dewey, Boland argued that managers should be aware that they are creating artefacts - whether they are things we associate with designers, like sketches, or things like credit default swaps, that we don't.

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) 2008

Designers observe, but anthropologists and sociologists trained in ethnography observe and pay a great deal of attention to the theories they use and develop while they do so. The EPIC conference, this year in its fourth iteration in Copenhagen, brings together those working in organizations for whom ethnography is central to their practice. They might be called designers, design anthropologists, ethnographers, or simply researchers. They might work in product development, in marketing, in strategy/futures, or in usability testing, depending on the organization, its industry practices and its maturity. EPIC brings these practitioners together with academics like me who are interested in the kinds of data that are gathered, or rather created, in the pursuit of organizational goals. As well as ethnographers from Intel, Microsoft and Yahoo, there were many from the (Danish) public sector and from design and research consultancies such as IDEO, live|work, and ReD Associates.

Conferences are hard work. Many are dull. The organizers of this one (this year chaired by Melissa Cefkin of IBM Research and Martha Cotton of gravitytank) paid a great deal of attention to the design of our experience as participants. There were not many sessions where we sat and listened to papers, though we did. There was a breakfast session at which we could go round to listen to people doing a show and tell of their artefacts. There was a future-facing session in which three influential people with visions of the future of ethnographic practice in organizations had their ideas acted out by the organizational theatre company Dacapo.

In my closing keynote Reassembling the Visual (PDF) I drew on Science and Technology Studies/Actor-Network-Theory to argue that ethnography should pay attention to the practices of contemporary artists and designers, who in my reading, assemble the social as described by Latour in Reassembling the Social (2005). I described projects by Anna Best (PHIL, 2002) and Chris Evans (Radical Loyalty, 2002-) and my own project Physical Bar Charts (2005-), a version of which was installed in the foyer at EPIC. I argued that these projects involve data gathering and organize people and objects into sets of relations, creating accounts of human experience in novel ways that social scientists should pay attention to.

In the Physical Bar Charts at EPIC, people could help themselves over the three days to badges as a way of answering the question 'How visible have you been this year?' (the conference theme being (in)visibility). The badge that was most popular was 'I made mistakes' - one important way of being visible, that it appears quite a good number of EPIC participants can tolerate being public about. The other badges were: 'I acted then thought'; 'I thought then acted'; and then 'I used Powerpoint'. The fifth badge - 'I saw the big picture' - was least taken/popular/visible, obviously not something people want to make claims about, this year anyway.

Here's the flickr site with participants photos.

Digital Economies

Multidisciplinary research projects being in fashion with academic funders, I was able to spend a couple of days at a project incubator workshop organized by one of the clusters supported through the Digital Economies initiative led by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. This brought together computer and social scientists, art and design practitioners and academics, and people from companies that design and make digital technologies to develop projects together that are concerned with health, transport and the creative industries. I took part in a number of conversations, in particular one concerned with researching the idea of a digital nexus for a post-car future, drawing on work by John Urry. Initiated by Monika Buscher, Daniela Sangiorgi and other colleagues from Lancaster University, this is an ambitious idea that seeks to develop and test product and service ideas, and policies, that are a preferable scenario for the future of a digital media economy enabling mobility.

What price creativity?

For those paying attention while around us, markets crash and companies fail, much of London has been busy with groovy-looking people assembling at events, workshops and exhibitions. The London Design Festival (which just finished) and London Fashion Week make September in London visually and intellectually stimulating and provide evidence that the creative economy is still highly dependent on social capital, not to mention the other sort.

During the London Design Festival, a panel discussion entitled "Can you teach it?" organized by the Financial Times brought together people involved in different ways in education and creativity: Michael Craig-Martin (artist and former tutor in fine art at Goldsmiths College), Ilse Crawford, interior designer and professor at the Design Academy in Eindhovern, Mat Hunter of IDEO, and Nick Leon, director of Design London. The event was chaired by Peter Aspden, arts correspondent at the FT, whose opening remarks pointed out the coincidence of Damien Hirst's paradigm-shifting sale of artworks by auction (raising £111m) during the same week that major financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers were failing.

The speakers, despite their differing backgrounds and working contexts, seemed to agree with each other on many of the points they discussed. These were (in no particular order) that:
- you can't teach 'creativity' as such but you can create possibilities for creativity to be freed
- the possibilities for creativity are linked to early years and secondary education
- changes in UK education resulting in an emphasis on assessment may stifle creativity in students
- creativity is a social process
- creativity requires constraints.
Nick Leon helpfully drew distinctions between some of the terms being used - creativity, design and innovation. His argument that what are needed now are Renaissance teams, not Renaissance individuals, makes sense to anyone who sees design as a multi-disciplinary effort.

But creativity is hard to think about out of context. The focus in this event, during this particular festival, was about the creativity, especially visual creativity, we associate with artists and designers, and the commercial and social value we give it. We should not forget the creativity involved in creating novel forms of financial instrument that make it almost impossible for financial regulators, or even managers in the same industry, to work out how much an asset is worth. That creativity - shorn from an ethical set of practices - is one that is going to shape the world for the next few years at least.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 8

Managing as designing

The final class of the elective drew on recent work in organization studies which takes the metaphor of management as being a kind of design practice. Boland and Collopy's conference and book Managing as Designing brought together leading academics and practitioners to explore this idea. More recently Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management has advocated integrative thinking and design thinking, arguing that executives should be aware they are involved in the design of business. A recent issue of the Journal of Business Strategy co-edited by Martin with strategy professor Jeanne Liedtka presented different approaches to thinking about this.

Borrowing a tool from the world of scenarios, students then created future news articles five years into the future which told stories of their (real) organizations. They were asked to imagine what could happen if the design-led approaches discussed in the elective were used in their organization. Finishing the elective in this way emphasized the importance of the imagination: a critical and possibly neglected approach to envisioning the future in contrast to the analytics of strategy.

Image by http://wordle.net/

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 7

Design-led innovation

Our guest speaker for this class was Andrew McGrath, head of design and usability at Orange Global. Andrew's presentation drew together ideas from other sessions including how the design team is integrated into a large and complex international company like Orange and its role in developing new products and services. Like the previous week's speaker, he emphasized the importance of design being integrated into a company's operations - a challenge for individual designers who through education or personality retain the idea of the designers as creative genius. His team work closely with the branding and market research teams. Their activities include consultancy for Orange's operations in different countries, the creation of style guides for products and services delivered by mobile networks, broadband and TV and benchmarking of customer experiences. "Good design can flourish in a corporation," he said but warned "this takes masses of effort and cunning to put it into practice."

The reading for this class included Hargadon's ideas of design leadership using design principles and practices; Hatchuel's concept of design-oriented organisations which develop a learning culture in order to exploit new knowledge and new concepts; and Verganti's research into innovation inspired by networks of designers and their creation of new product languages.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 6

Humans v users

This class looked in detail at user-centred and human-centred design. Most of it was taken up with a practical exercise, using experential learning to examine how assumptions about end users of designs are built into them. A development of the idea of 'lead users' (von Hippel), the design method that involves following extreme users is a way to bring into focus the needs and desires of users whose activities might stress or break a design, or who know it inside out through their repeated use of it.



The class were given some props: a wheelchair; a pair of crutches; ear plugs; and modified sunglasses. I also asked the class to imagine being someone who could not speak English nor read the Roman alphabet. The students' task was to find out train times and ticket information (using the web, phone service or in person) and then buy a ticket and board a train. The point was not to examine just the needs of users with recognised disabilities (where design is often governed by legislation) but to consider also users whose use of a design is hampered by reduced vision or a hearing impairment. The photos show some of the MBAs playing their roles using their props, while others filmed, took photos and notes. (Our thanks to the staff at Oxford train station for their patience!)



The approaches called universal design (advocated by companies like Oxo whose Good Grips brand has created a new category of highly desirable home products easily used by older people) or inclusive design make an argument about designing to include people who may not fit the obvious marketing categories. This is can be an ethical argument, but it can also be seen as an opportunity for innovation.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 5

Design management: using design to add value

The first week of the elective looked in detail at the design process, design methods, the ways we think about 'good' and 'bad' design and introduced some of the newer design disciplines. This session looked at the way that design can be managed to add value within organizations. The field of design management has articulated some of the different ways real organizations do this: differentiating organizations through a powerful and consistent brand and through the styling of products; coordinating the development of products and services in multidisciplinary teams; or possibly playing a more transformational role, helping ask questions about the future and having a key role in innovation (Borja de Mozta). We considered the question of how to organize to make best use of design: as an internal function, or using external consultants? Hargadon's research into IDEO's role as technology brokers provided an important argument about the benefits of the cross-pollination of ideas from industry to industry.

For managers, a key question is how to assess the effectiveness of design, broadly conceived, or a design department. There's no standard framework for this. We looked at research by the Design Council that found a positive correlation between companies that were recognised as achieving good design, and stock market performance. We also discussed how awards can sometimes mark out organizations for whom the role of design is key.

During this class students had an opportunity to reflect on the role of design in their own organizations. Did they find evidence of silent design, or design management in which design helps differentiated products through styling or having a key role in new product development; or did they think that design played a role in asking strategic questions for the organization? Not surprisingly, few of the MBAs knew of an organization that had a 'Chief Design Officer' at board level. But several wanted to find ways to think about how they might implement some of the elective's ideas in their own firm - potentially becoming design leaders themselves.